On Sunday, I followed the BAFTA ceremony on the BAFTAs social media account, where they were posting videos and updates. After the In Memoriam section aired during the telecast, there was a sudden kerfuffle in the Twitter comments – people were outraged that Matthew Perry had been left out of the tributes for artists who had passed away in the past year. The poor BAFTA social media person kept posting the same explanation to everyone complaining, which was that Perry would be memorialized during the upcoming BAFTA Television Awards. People were NOT happy.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has responded to online backlash over Matthew Perry’s absence from the 2024 EE BAFTA Film Awards’ In Memoriam segment on Sunday. After Perry, who died last October at age 54, did not appear during the tribute — set to a special arrangement of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” performed by Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham — social media users were quick to criticize the decision.
On X (formerly Twitter), users called out BAFTA for the perceived omission, which one dubbed “bad form” alongside a GIF of Perry’s Friends character, Chandler Bing, saying, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Some were perplexed by Perry’s absence, calling it “shockingly bad” and a “shocking omission.”
Others simply sought an explanation, writing, “Why wasn’t [Matthew Perry] included in the memorial sequence???”
Responding to Perry’s absence from the tribute, a spokesperson for BAFTA tells PEOPLE, “I can confirm Matthew Perry will be remembered in our forthcoming BAFTA Television Awards.”
On X, BAFTA echoed this statement, writing, “Matthew Perry will be remembered in this year’s TV Awards ceremony,” and shared the link to the academy’s online tribute to the actor.
As I said, I felt bad for the social media person, because they were really under siege from people who outraged by BAFTA’s decision. I even sort of thought that the social media person probably disagreed with the decision, given they made a point of responding to several critics (thus probably making it into a bigger deal). It was such a stupid call by the BAFTAs, to gatekeep which deceased actors were “worthy” of the BAFTA Film memorial. While Perry was absolutely more famous for his television work, he appeared in fourteen films, including The Whole Nine Yards (an expected hit). His loss was devastating to the acting community entirely, regardless of whether he was “film actor” or “television actor.” This whole thing is so utterly snobby.
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